Brolga - A Life Well Lived - Chapter 2 - Brolga and the Lachlan

BROLGA

A Life Well Lived

Chapter 2 – Brolga and the Lachlan

The Lachlan River slides past Condobolin like a quiet memory waking itself up. Mist curls along the bank, ghostly and patient, and the bridge sits solid and unremarkable across the water, a grey line between now and then. A service station buzzes dimly across the river, trucks rumble by on the bypass, and the day begins with the soft clack of bait tins and the wary whistle of a siren sun. I set the phone on the rock, press record, and the river breathes in. The moment is not a stage-set, but a doorway. The riverbank is the hinge.

Brolga tosses a coil of line over the side, taps the reel, and the line glints like a small promise. He looks up, half-smiling, as if the day has already started telling him a story he’s only just remembered how to hear. “Who took you fishing first?” I ask, the question slipping out with the mist.

“No one actually took me. I went with the old man a couple of times, just sort of picked it up.” His voice is even, with that old-world practicality, the kind that doesn’t ask for drama and rarely admits defeat. He doesn’t rush to elaborate, and when he does it’s with a shrug that says more than words might: life made the arrangements, not a plan.

“He wasn’t around much, was he?” I press, because the river lowers its voice the moment you name an absence.

Nah, he says, and the word sits between us like a stone in the water. He lets it lie there for a moment, the afternoon’s light edging across the river, the line stilling in the shadows of the reel. “He was away shearing most of the time and fencing and …” He cuts himself off, the edge of something he doesn’t quite want to revisit catching on the line, as if the memory itself feels like a snag that could snap the morning if pulled too hard.

“Now I understand your mother was the biggest influence in your life,” I say gently, turning the riverbank into a question rather than a summary. “But I want to talk about Cyril for a little while. What sort of influence was he?”

Brolga’s hands slow the reel, as if savouring the moment that’s not about catching fish but about hearing something someone else might want him to say. “Oh well, I wasn’t around him all that much. He used to take me out to the sheds on the weekends. He would do a few pets, shear or crutch, for his mates and that around the place, and tried to teach me to shear when I was about eight or nine, I suppose.”

The morning holds its breath a beat longer, and then the river resumes its patient, patient flow. Cyril, his father’s father, William Ferguson’s son, the Aboriginal Activist whose statue sits in Dubbo and nods to a legacy that wouldn’t be silenced, lifts his shadow over the moment with the casual gravity of a man who has learned to carry a long coast of memory like a saddlebag. Cyril, in the family stories, was a man of pockets and distances: away for long runs of work, home only to pass through, a maker and a gambler, and a line between pride and trouble that’s hard to trace when you’re standing on the bank and the line is your own life.

Brolga’s face is all placid skin and inner weather as he unfolds the thought with the careful restraint that life has taught him. The years press in, those years when a boy on the edge of Condobolin learns the old ways and the new ones at once, when the road between Orange Street and Addis Street isn’t just pavement but a kind of social weather map. Cyril’s absence isn’t a drama in the telling; it’s a texture, a constant drift beneath the surface that the family learned to read by feel, not by page.

The film Sunday Too Far Away (1975 – Roadshow Film Distributors) sits somewhere near the corners of this memory, a cultural touchstone that helps him unspool what he can’t quite name aloud. In the shed, in the bunkhouse, in the long hours under the gum-nut night, the men move with a rhythm that can feel like a blade’s edge: the jokes that land, the arguments that dissipate into smoke, the work that both defines a man and isolates him. The film doesn’t pretend the life isn’t hard; it makes the hardness visible, and in doing so it offers a language for a boy like Brolga to hear the unspoken echo of his father’s absence without spilling it into the air like a storm.

“Sunday Too Far Away,” I murmur softly, not as a clinical observation but as an old friend’s nudge toward memory. The line about the workload, the endless pull of days on days, the week’s breath held until the whistle of the truck and the bunkhouse’s dim light at the end, feels to him like a mirror held to a past that is always just out of reach. The film’s men talk of wages that come late, of weather that turns in a blink, of the camaraderie that keeps a crew tethered even when the home fires seem far away. It’s not that his father loved work more than family; it’s that the work carved a certain shape into Cyril, a shape his family learned to recognise as their own.

Yet the memory isn’t only about the film. It’s about a generation of women, especially his mother, who learned to shoulder a dozen lives at once while the town’s whispers taught a child to read faces before names. Cyril’s absence was a weather pattern, a force that shaped the family’s daily script without ever needing a lecture. The dogooders of the system, whose voices rose in corners of town to decide who could stay and who would be taken, cast a long, cold shadow, and the children learned to move through the day with their ethnicity tucked away like a precious tool kept out of sight. The strength of his mother becomes the quiet fulcrum of the memory, the one steady hand that kept a large brood from toppling when the wind blew from every direction.

I watch Brolga’s hands slow on the reel, the way the line’s arc traces a story of its own. The old man’s pattern, a man away, then back for a breath, then gone again, plays out in the cadence of Cyril’s life. He’s the sort of man who could be gone for a season and come back with a pocket full of stories that didn’t quite belong to the day’s ledger, stories that stitched themselves into the family’s fabric in ways no ledger could ever record. The pride and the trouble are two threads in the same cloth, and it’s the cloth that Tells the story of a life more than any single thread could.

The memory doesn’t demand melodrama. It asks for a listener who can hear the space between the lines, the pauses, the line-checks, the practical jokes that land and the ones that sink away. Cyril’s edge, the “pockets and distances” described in the family memory, feels to Brolga like the way the river’s current handles driftwood: it takes what it needs and leaves the rest to float a little longer, until the river itself decides to move on. He doesn’t speak of the exact acts that might have stained or scarred him; he speaks instead of the presence that shaped him, the man who was both a worker and a wanderer, a maker and a gambler, a father who didn’t stay long enough to become a hinge, yet left a hinge behind him nonetheless.

There is a moment when the memory gathers, not with a cry but with a quiet, stubborn gravity, and the morning holds its breath again. The shelter of the line, the shed’s dull roar, the bunkhouse’s cheap magic of company, all of it sits inside the man’s reticence, like a set of tools tucked away in a box that you only open when you’re sure you won’t drop them. The film’s depiction of masculine stoicism, the way men speak in short words, how silence is often the loudest thing a room can bear, becomes a language he already speaks, a way to tell without shouting how a life could teach you to stand still when a memory is too heavy to lift.

So the morning continues, and Cyril’s shadow remains a living current below the surface, a reminder that the life Brolga inherited was carved as much by what stayed away as by what stayed there. The river keeps its measured time, the bait tins clack softly, and the day’s bright ordinary becomes a vessel for the extraordinary fact of a family that survived by keeping faith with each other and with the quiet, stubborn truth that some stories are kept because they are too human to be spoken aloud in the moment of the telling.

And if the memory needs a cue to step forward, it will find it in the next interruption: a line touch, a dog barking in the distance, a truck’s rumble over the bridge, a joke that lands with a small, dry laugh. The film’s texture and Cyril’s measured life fuse in that fleeting exchange, and the river’s pace, patient as ever, carries us toward the next memory, the next name, the next street, the next way a family learns to belong in a town that does not always know how to welcome the truth of them.

The river glides on, a patient witness to the quiet revolutions of the town. The morning on the Lachlan still hums with current and bite-sized truths, but my thoughts drift inland to the real turning of the map: the move from Orange Street to Addis Street, mid-century Condobolin, when the town’s pecking order thinned out into another layer of life. The shift wasn’t just a change of address; it felt like stepping up a rung in a social ladder that didn’t acknowledge every rung equally. It was the 1950s, the stolen generations whispered in the margins of every council lot, and a family of thirteen learning to live with the tremors of a world that could take you away if you drew the wrong breath.

Brolga’s voice, steady as a line on the reel, interrupts the drift. “Nah, we lived in Orange Street till I was seven, I suppose, then we moved up to Addis Street. That was a different world for us.” The river nods, as if it understands that a door in the town map opened, and the rooms beyond were not merely bigger, but different in tone, different in expectation. He gestures toward the water, as if the river itself might measure the distance between streets with its slow, accurate current.

“Housing Commission, wasn’t it?” I push, tasting the texture of the moment, the riverbank becoming a pencil-point map, the small traffic of memory scribbling its routes across the page of now.

“Yeah, yeah. We had, to us, it was a brand new city. One end of town to the other.” His laugh is the dry, useful kind that a man uses to keep a memory from turning sour. It’s not a joke so much as a readiness to carry a burden without it breaking him open, which is the kind of strength this morning’s memory demands.

The move itself sits in the air between us, loaded with the unspoken. The eastern end to the western, Orange Street to Addis Street, not merely miles but a shift in the town’s mood. The geography here isn’t just streets; it’s the order of days, the social weather, the look people give you when you walk past the shopfronts with a dozen mouths to feed and a dozen stories to tell. The change of postcode becomes a change in how you’re watched, how you move, how you’re allowed to move.

I know what I’m asking for now, though it isn’t stated aloud. The “conflict” wasn’t staged, it wasn’t a headline, it was the quiet gravity of a family finding its place in a town that measured you by the street you lived on, by the angle of your front fence, by whether you kept your head down when the dogooders of the system meandered through the lanes with their clipboards and questions. The vagaries of the stolen generation, those doubts that lace a community’s breath, cast a long shadow over a family who kept their ethnicity cloaked as if it were a secret that might be used against them if the night grew crowded with strangers who believed themselves to be keepers of the right.

“Moving up in the pecking order,” I say softly, almost to the river, almost to the wind that carries the sound of distant traffic and the memory of a child’s steady pulse. “That would have felt like a kind of ascent, even if the stairs were uneven.”

Brolga’s eyes touch the surface of the river, not meeting mine but taking in the whole of Condobolin’s morning. “A different world,” he repeats, with that laconic certainty that comes from long years of surviving a landscape that can be kind and cruel in the same breath. “It wasn’t like we’d chosen to climb. It was more like the town decided we needed a different shadow, a new silhouette on its horizon. There were, all told, 13 of us, you know, but never all in the same house at the same time. Me and my brothers and sisters, all piled into the same sketchbook, all scribbled in the margins of a life that wouldn’t be allowed to stand out too far from the rules.”

The memory leans forward, heavy with the weight of what went unspoken. The family was a bright, unruly constellation, the kind of household that made its own weather, that learned to read the sky by what the landlord didn’t say and by the way the clock on the wall stuck to its own stubborn pace. The children grew up under a chorus of care, mother’s strength, the older siblings’ quiet governance, a village of practical love that didn’t call itself a village at all.

The childhood memory of mine steps in, “I remember the house my mother’s family lived in,” I say, seeking a hinge between a street name and a life’s compass. “A housing commission home on Addis Street in Condobolin, right?”

He tilts his head, a small, wry smile tucked into the corner of his mouth. “Nah, we lived in Orange Street till I was seven, I suppose, then we moved up to Addis Street. That was a different world for us.” The river’s surface reflects a light he isn’t chasing so much as remembering: the light of a child’s eye when a new street sign becomes a promise and a warning in one breath.

“Different world,” I echo, letting the words land with the patience of a man who has learned to listen to membranes of time as they separate and rejoin. “What was the change like in the family, in the daily rhythm, when Addis Street opened its gates to you?”

He keeps the cadence, the practical cadence, the way a man might steady a line’s spool. “We had, to us, it was a brand new city. One end of town to the other.” The line about the city is a joke, a small moment of relief, a bridge of humour across the heavier memory it supports. The new address wasn’t just a quarter of a mile; it was a reorientation of how the world saw you and how you learned to see the world back.

The deeper current of memory surfaces again: the kids hidden from ethnicity, the fear of being taken by the do-gooders of the system, the schooling and the streets that demanded a kind of discretion that felt like a second language. The mother’s resilience becomes the quiet backbone of the story; she did the work of keeping a large family intact outwardly while navigating a system that would have liked to define them by fear, not by truth. The children learned to move through town without calling attention to the places that marked them as different, to keep their gaze level with the window ledges, to understand that some doors were best left closed, not because the family was ashamed, but because some doors would invite questions that could unravel the delicate cloth of their daily life.

“We were hidden, you know,” Brolga continues, almost as if he’s testing the wind for the weight of the memory. “Not out in the open, not seen as ‘the Aboriginal family on the next block.’ The fear wasn’t about a fight with the town; it was about keeping us from being whisked away in the night by people who believed they were doing the right thing in the name of care and protection.”

A short silence, and then a small, rueful smile. “We as kids, were almost blissfully unaware,” he adds, as if the innocence of youth could be a kind of armour without which the mother’s strength would have cracked under the pressure of a century trying to rearrange itself around them.

The river keeps its own counsel, and so do the memories. The house on Addis Street becomes a different kind of address now: not just a place where we slept and ate, but a locus in the town’s ledger, the page where the names of thirteen children finally found a rhythm that could keep them connected to each other and to the oldest roots they dared to claim without fear. The mother’s work, which looked ordinary from the outside, a job, chores, the daily grind of keeping a large family fed and safe, feels, in memory, nearly heroic. She held the line with a quiet stubbornness, a practical mercy that said: we are here, we belong, we will not let the world decide who we are.

The old men at the sheds, the neighbours, the schoolyard tales, these all pressed in around the family, shaping how the children learned to inhabit both a town and a heritage that they didn’t always name aloud. The pecking order wasn’t a chart on the wall; it was a living, breathing social map, and the move to Addis Street was the map re-drawn to place them nearer to the heart of the town, nearer the places where a family could survive, where the mother’s strength could be seen, where the siblings could practice the art of being many people at once, sons and daughters, protectors and taught ones, hidden and visible in ways that didn’t require a single declaration of identity.

As the memory settles, I hear the river again, the soft clack of bait tins, the distant rumble of traffic over the bridge, the morning already turning toward afternoon. The memory of the move, of the family’s ascent and its quiet, stubborn dignity, sits like a weight in the pocket of the present moment. It is not a loud revelation, but a reminder that a life can climb a town’s stairs without ever shouting about it, by the simple act of staying close to one another, through the weather, through the fear, through the day-to-day labour that keeps a family breathing.

The sun angles a little higher. The lines in the water drift with the current, and the memory drifts with them, an old, steady chant: that the river remembers where you came from even when the town pretends not to. And that sometimes, moving from one end of town to the other is less about geography than about learning to live with courage, restraint, and a mother’s unspoken, enduring love. The next memory waits just beyond the bend, and the Lachlan keeps its patient time, inviting us to look ahead while we listen closely to what has already been lived.

I grin back, remembering how little a kid in a jam tin could pretend to be a king without a crown. “Not knowing the lay of the land like a true local,” I rib, “one end of town is only two streets away, right?”

“Yeah but it’s about five mile long,” he retorts with a shrug that makes the line spool out again. We are down the eastern end, he adds, and we’ll drift up to the west end later like the river decides to carry us somewhere else.

A memory slips in, an ordinary domestic image that feels suddenly like a discovery: “We used to be the jam-tin hockey kids,” he says, and the phrase lands with the soft thud of a puck tapping the ice in some faint, distant game. “If you had a jam tin you were the best kid in the class, because you had a hockey ball. We used to play hockey with jam tins.” He grimaces at the ache in the memory, the hard edges that come from playing with what you could scrounge, the improvised sticks, the risk of cut eyes, knuckles bent into the habit of hard play. “No, there weren’t a lot of money for balls,” he explains, the simplicity of the explanation a kind of mercy. “There were a lot of cut eyes, cut fingers, and bent knuckles and things in them days playing hockey with an old gadgie stick.”

I lean into the moment, letting the ordinary texture of those days, the jam tins, the makeshift sticks, the sound of a crowd that isn’t there, wash over us, and I guide the conversation toward the man who shaped much of what would come after: Cyril, the father’s father, the man who wasn’t always present but who sometimes opened a door.

A wry warmth threads its way through his voice. The memory is not a parade; it’s a way of staying afloat. “Lamenting my time in the sheds,” I tease, conjuring the image of a boy’s hands blistered by the work that would later become his very life, “I hope you didn’t try and do that too much, that’s too much like hard work that is.”

The memory lingers, and the river keeps time with it. The conversation moves with the river’s own current, from the present to the past and back again without making a sermon of it. “It was then too,” he continues, a small exhale as if he’s blowing away a remnant of doubt. “But oh yeah, he used to go out fishing with me. We all used to go, the part of the family that wasn’t working would go.”

“There was thirteen of you, wasn’t there?” I prompt, because the number feels like a boundary of stories.

“Altogether yeah. Yep.” The twins died at birth, they were the first, then we came along one by one from Bette to Julie. 

The story narrows and sharpens for a moment, focusing on the barbered edge between the man who was and the life he would live. “So how come Uncle Donald ended up being a shearing contractor?” I ask, a curiosity that sits lightly on the line.

“Donnie was one of the best shearers I ever seen,” Brolga answers with that straight, practical pride that never shouts. “Albeit he’s my brother and I’ve seen some good’uns in me time, but…” The sentence trails with the unspoken respect that belongs to men who have done the work and know its poetry as well as its pain.

“Did you see my dad shear?” I throw in, tracing a thread between generations.

“Yeah I never saw Ron shear, no.” The memory of those names carries weight, an echo of a hundred sheds that have become a single, unspoken landscape.

The morning slides toward a strip of quiet, and the talk of a different kind of life, the life of a shearer’s days, of meat and day’s work and a family of thirteen, edges past like a shadow with a memory inside it. He remembers the old jokes, the wagers men make and break, the tiny rebellions that can only be understood by those who stood in the rafters of a shed and heard the way a line can snap, the way a fisherman’s patience is occasionally rewarded by a bite on a morning that was almost not there at all.

“The shearers used to bet that I wouldn’t make forty,” he says at last, almost as if naming a personal alarm clock could somehow keep the clock from striking. “I was a little bit wild at times and almost human now.” The dry punctuation of that line, almost human now, brings a rueful smile to his lips, and I savour the moment as one savours a small, stubborn truth.

“Rouse a bouting or…” I bait the river with a tease, and he plays along with that same old larrikin’s spark. “Yeah I would wait up in the rafters in the shed and dive on some poor silly bastard coming in and (oh there goes the line again, might be a sinker turning over, it’s a round sinker).”

The river continues to fish in front of us, a thread of earth and water waiting for something to happen. We glance at the lines, at the earthworms lying in their pale, patient way on the tray, and the talk drifts back to the simple, stubborn humour that keeps a life afloat. “No we got no Carp here,” Brolga says, as if naming a dry truth about the geography of this river and this family is a way to steady the morning. “I haven’t seen any tracks or nothing yet, famous last words.”

That sly, practical honesty, that the river itself is a thing you tend and respect and sometimes compete with, becomes the piece that holds the day together. I nod, feeling the rhythm of memory slip into place, as the mist thickens just a little at the water’s edge.

“Life isn’t meant to be endured,” I murmur, half to him, half to the river, half to the morning itself. He doesn’t argue the point; the line on the water just keeps moving, and the river keeps its counsel.

The scene settles again into the slow, patient act of fishing. The interruptions, the distant rattle of a truck, the soft ping of a line dipping into water, the occasional joke traded between memory and present moment, are not intrusions but part of the texture. They’re the small breaths that let a life be listened to with care. The river is not just a backdrop here; it is the slow drumbeat beneath the memory, the place from which memory rises.

And so we drift, not with a plan but with a listening, the recorder catching the quiet bursts of laughter and the way a story unfolds in the space between one breath and the next. The day is not a lecture or a list of dates; it’s the slow, steady opening of a life, the way a morning on the Lachlan can teach you to see a life in the steady, practical arcs of work and family and the quiet, stubborn grace of a man who learned to fish and, in learning to fish, learned to tell a life.

The lines sit in the water, and the world sits with them. The sun climbs a little higher, and Brolga’s voice, steady as a late freight’s whistle, keeps time with the river. We pause, as we always do, to listen for a moment more of the old truth that the river keeps offering: that a simple morning, if you listen closely enough, can unfold into the story of a whole life, told by a man who has walked that life with hands that remember and a heart that keeps the humour intact, even when the memory aches a little.

If we are to leave, the river won’t complain. It will wait for the next memory, the next line, the next moment when the present coincides with the past and we are reminded again of how far a single quiet life can travel when you give it room to tell its own story. The morning on the Lachlan has given us a doorway, and in the doorway stands Brolga, patient, dry, and true, ready to step through and begin again.